Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The 'Facing Your Fears' Edition of the Patients for a Moment Blog Carnival

Welcome to the Face Your Fears edition of the Patients for a Moment blog carnival. This time patient bloggers were challenged to write about their fears: what they are, how they face them and what they do to overcome them. The results are, in a word, fantastic. Not only are there plenty of tips, tricks and strategies shared in this collection of 14 posts, there are wonderfully encouraging and reassuring examples of how people living with illness are successfully facing all sort of challenges that life is throwing their way.

The Really Big Fears

In her post Fear, Amanda recounts her journey with a chronic and progressive liver disease that resulted in her liver transplant on August 31, 2010. She makes a very compelling case for changing how we think about the uncertainties in our lives. Read her encouraging and heartwarming story at Amanda's Journey.

Joanna is kind of enough to share a lot of things with us about her fight against thyroid cancer, including her method for fighting her fears. Now she is in control! Get the details when you visit her post Life Redefined: Unlearning Fear over at Dear Thyroid.

Lauren calls her latest hospitalization a "veering off the road and into the dark unknown." And it has been one scary ride! How she faces the fear entangled with a new diagnosis turns out to be a lesson for us all, as you will discover in Myasthenia Gravis: A New Diagnosis Knocks Me From My Path at her blog Novel Patient.

Questions and Answers

Embrace that your worst fears about your health have just come true? Don't be taken aback by this bold question posed to us by SR at How Can I Explain It to You? The Life of a Grad Student with Lupus. Read the post Sunday Breakfast Club: Worst fear? Check. and benefit from the words of wisdom she provides.

You have to admire Aviva's honesty and candor when she talks about the three things that scare her the most in Things That Go Bump in the Night. This Sick Momma also shares her coping strategies, which include taking things one minute, one hour and one day at a time.

"Can you believe that she has Fibromyalgia?" Rosemary Lee thinks fighting the disbelief she faces from her friends and family makes it harder for her to face her own fear about living with chronic illness. Get the whole story in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas over at her blog Seeking Equilibrium.

In just a short year and a half, Annie has made some extraordinary progress in her battle against her fears. Sharing her advice, you can just feel her building strength, courage and winning attitude. Read What Am I Afraid Of? Almost Everything! at It's Time to Get Over How Fragile You Are and see how Fragile Annie is coping with her physical and mental illnesses.

Humor and Insight

It is worth a trip over to visit Rachael at Glass of Win just to see the humorous cartoon she uses to illustrate the first of the four fears she discussed in PFAM: Frightfully Fearful. We can relate to her discussion about "medical upkeep" and hope the new health care reform law will address this important issue.

Leave it to witty Nessie at lipstick, perfume and too many pills to inspire our fight against fear with, among other things, a quote from a famous science fiction novel. Read this quote and all the other useful and uplifting insights about fear she uncovers in litany against fear.

Do you try to sweep your fears under the rug, only to have them pop back out because you've stuff too many of them under there? Boy can Jamie, the Chronic Migraine Warrior, relate. She share four tips on how to cope and would like you to add to her list with your comments. Check out Fear in the Life of a Chronic Migraineur.

Crying by the pool might not be cute, but it was just the thing ChronicBabe Jenni needed to do. In that moment, she realized she needed to face the fears that were holding her back from the life she wanted to be living. She showing us all we can have the life we want too, despite chronic illness, in her post It's Time for Some Big Changes at ChronicBabe HQ.

The Every Day Fears

Sure, she's had cancer. But it was all the little things Selena here at Oh My Aches and Pains! had to do to restart her life after cancer treatment that scared her the most. In her post Nothing to Fear, she describes how she felt the fear and began to live her life once again.

Face life....one fear at a time. at it's no more in my head is a simple but elegant explanation of how chronic illness can transform ordinary things like taking a walk alone and or saying no into everyday fears. Shweta tells us about a time when illness gave her nothing to look forward to, so she decided to reframe her fears into challenges and in the process created a new element of excitement in her life.

Sometimes it's the little reminders of your chronic illness that cause the most fear, like weigh gain, hair loss and pudgy fingers. So Phylor decided to try to the "light of day" approach with her post fears, phobias, philosophizing, and PFAM at Phylor's Blog to see if she could move beyond her self-described phobias.

So did you get inspired and motivated reading all these great posts to face your own fears too? We hope so!

Thank you to all the patient bloggers who submitted their posts for consideration. Thanks to Leslie who manages this blog carnival and to the carnival founder Duncan Cross. We had a great time here at Oh My Aches and Pains! hosting once again and look forward to the next time.

We are please to announce that Rachael of Glass of Win is hosting the next edition on October 27, 2010. If you'd like to participate, please visit the Patients for a Moment website for more information, including submission guidelines and information on how you can host PFAM on your blog too.

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Selena, thank you for pulling this great collection together. I wanted to put something together for this ed. of PFAM but eye surgery derailed me getting it done on time..folks can read about it and how scared I was, here: http://www.bignoise-enterprises.com/blog/2010/10/13/c-is-for-compassion/

I talk about the fear and the lack of compassion on the part of the doctor.

Fabulous topic, and an even more fabulous edition of PFAM! Thanks so much for including my post. I'm finding myself inspired by so many of the other contributions, and am delighted to find some blogs and writers that were new to me. :-)